Geezerdate.com

 

"Make good choices, Dear." -quote from a silly movie...Jamie Lee Curtis speaking to teen daughter as the daughter leaves for school. Regardless of the source, it is good advice and captures what teens are facing.

Where are the economists? The outsourcing of American jobs to low wage countries is a hot topic. The related trade deficit is a crisis, according to the media. Workers are pessimistic about the future. Many feel leveling the playing field in trade means Americans will be “leveled “(by reduced wages and benefits). But there is a puzzle here as well. The economists, the experts who have made a career out of studying such things as free trade, say outsourcing is a good thing. These days you have to read this in their books because they are not saying it in public. Lou Dobbs, the CNN news guy, talks gloom and doom about outsourcing on every broadcast but never has economists on to defend outsourcing. The President’s economic advisors apparently like outsourcing and now want to dramatically expand trade with South America. There is a disconnect here…the media and the public are distrustful and afraid while the economists press for fewer restrictions and more trade. Here in Bloomington there must be many economic experts. I invite them to defend their profession by explaining, in layman’s terms please, why outsourcing is good thing and why we should not worry about being “leveled”.

Op-ed ltr sent today.

The much feared SEC (corporate watchdog) 

The GAO did a study looking at five cases where the court ordered restitution be paid totaling $568Million. They found that after eight years only 7% had been paid.
ref: www.gao.gov, report GAO-05-80

School funding: (my letter published in my local paper op-ed page)

I think good teachers deserve good pay but is more money really the answer for education? If that were the case the schools with the highest funding should be the best. In 2001 the average annual expenditure in the U.S. for grades K thru 12 was $7284 per student. The average for Indiana was $7287. The most costly school system in Indiana was Gary at $9349 per student. The top three states in spending averaged close to $11,000 per student. These were NY, NJ and Washington DC which have some of the worst performing schools in the country. Western European nations such as England, France and Germany spend much less on education than the United States and apparently get better results. It seems that, on average, school success has little to do with funding. The excellent education series printed recently in the H-T indicated that a child’s parents and peers are the main factors that determine success in school. I think most people already know this. It is praiseworthy that our country spends more to help bad schools but the figures show more funding will not overcome shortcomings in the home and the neighborhood.

References:
(1) http://ftp2.census.gov/govs/school/01fullreport.pdf
(2) http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/200101.pdf